A Moscow court has banned the public from a hearing in a case brought by Russian prosecutors to label jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny’s anti-corruption organization and its regional offices as “extremist” organizations.
The court ruled on April 19 that the case involved a state secret, but Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), said the Prosecutor-General’s Office had no evidence on which to base its claim.
Zhdanov also said the decision means Navalny’s associates will not be able to view the evidence filed in the case until the day of the hearing, set for April 26, in a special unit of the Moscow City Court. Only lawyers involved in the case can get access to the materials now.
The latest move against Navalny’s opposition movement comes as Navalny is in the third week of a hunger strike. The imprisoned opposition leader was transferred on April 19 to a correctional facility hospital amid intensifying pressure from the West.
Russian prosecutors last week accused the FBK, Russia’s largest opposition network, of working to create conditions for “changing the foundations of the constitutional order.”
It said the FBK operates “under the guise of liberal slogans” as it engages “in creating conditions for the destabilization of the social and sociopolitical situation.”
The extremist label, if approved, would severely limit Navalny’s allies and activists from organizing, criminalizing such things as calling for or participating in protests. Navalny’s aides and organizations are already subject to frequent police raids and arrests over their political activities.
The decision to close the proceeding comes as Navalny’s aides are pushing for massive nationwide anti-government protests on April 21.
Navalny was sentenced in February to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were politically motivated. He was arrested in January after returning from Germany, where he was treated for a poison attack with a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group.
The Kremlin says Russian President Vladimir Putin will speak later this week at an online summit on climate change organized by the United States.
Putin will “outline Russia’s approaches in the context of forging broad international cooperation aimed at overcoming the negative effects of global climate change,” the Kremlin said in a statement on April 19.
U.S. President Joe Biden last month invited Putin and other world leaders to the virtual summit on April 22-23.
But since then, relations between Washington and Moscow have entered a new phase of heightened tensions with Biden announcing punishing sanctions over cyberattacks, election interference, and threats against U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Further souring the mood — and raising questions over whether Putin would attend the summit — has been the issue of the health of jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny, Russia’s buildup of troops along the border in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and new allegations of Russian involvement in a deadly explosion at a munitions depot in the Czech Republic in 2014.
Biden also invited Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has not yet said whether he will take part.
The gathering is meant to highlight Washington’s renewed commitment to stemming climate change, and build toward the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) this November in Glasgow, Scotland, the White House said on March 26.
Biden rejoined the 2015 Paris Agreement on his first day in the White House, reversing former President Donald Trump’s exit from the landmark climate accord.
The White House has said that climate change is one area where it may be possible to cooperate with China and Russia, even as ties are strained over many other issues.
The United States and China agreed that stronger pledges to fight climate change should be pursued in line with the Paris Agreement, according to a joint statement issued on April 17 after U.S. climate envoy John Kerry visited Shanghai.
“The United States and China are committed to cooperating with each other and with other countries to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it demands,” the joint statement said.
Based on reporting by AFP, Reuters, and RIA Novosti
Russia’s prison service says opposition politician Aleksei Navalny will be transferred to a hospital in a correctional facility near his current one amid concerns his health was deteriorating rapidly as he entered his 20th day of a hunger strike over his medical treatment.
“At present, A. Navalny’s health condition is assessed as satisfactory; he is examined by a general practitioner every day. With the consent of the patient, he was prescribed vitamin therapy,” the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) branch in the Vladimir region said in a statement on April 19.
Just before the weekend, Navalny’s personal doctor and three other physicians, including a cardiologist, pleaded for access to the 44-year-old in a letter to the FSIN, saying he could suffer cardiac arrest at “any minute.”
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman, warned over the weekend that the Kremlin critic — who months earlier fell gravely ill after a poison attack with a chemical nerve agent — could die within “days” if action wasn’t taken soon.
Navalny’s situation is adding to already severe strains in Russia’s ties with the West. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on April 18 that the U.S. government had told Russia “there will be consequences” if Navalny dies in prison.
European Union foreign ministers are expected to discuss the Navalny case on April 19.
Josep Borrell, the bloc’s top diplomat, warned ahead of the meeting that the EU will hold Moscow responsible for the Kremlin critic’s health.
“We make the Russian authorities responsible for the health situation of Mr. Navalny,” Borrell said.
Navalny was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany, where he was treated after being poisoned in Siberia in August 2020 with what was defined by European labs as a Novichok nerve agent. He has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, which the Kremlin has denied.
A Moscow court in February converted a 3 1/2-year suspended sentence on a charge that Navalny and his supporters call politically motivated to real jail time, saying he broke the terms of the original sentence by leaving Russia for Germany for the life-saving treatment he received.
The court reduced the time Navalny must spend in prison to just over 2 1/2 years because of time already served in detention.
BAIMAK, Russia — An outspoken environmental activist who has been looking into illegal gold mining in Russia’s Bashkortostan region says he was viciously beaten by unknown attackers in the town of Baimak.
Ildar Yumagulov was hospitalized with two broken legs after three men attacked him 200 meters away from a police station on April 18.
He told RFE/RL that two masked men in black clothing beat him with baseball bats and that when he managed to escape the attack, a third masked man appeared and knocked him down to allow the attack to continue.
“They beat me with baseball bats, targeting my legs, breaking them. One leg was fully smashed, surgery is planned for tomorrow,” Yumagulov said, adding that the attackers did not say a word during the attack.
Bashkortostan’s Interior Ministry has not commented on the attack.
According to Yumagulov, the attack is most likely linked to his latest activities on gold mining in the Urals, where, according to him and his colleagues, mining companies are violating environmental safety norms.
Yumagulov’s colleague, Ilsur Irnazarov, told RFE/RL that unknown individuals were suspected of following Yumagulov and his car for several weeks before the attack.
“We’re certain the attack is linked to Ildar Yumagulov’s public activities and his civil stance…. It was an act of intimidation to scare Ildar and all enviromental activists of the Urals and our republic in general,” Irnazarov said.
Yumagulov is known for his various activities against uncontrolled gold mining in Bashkortostan.
In recent weeks he was working on finding details of possible plans by a gold-mining company to start a mine in the Baimak district of the republic.
The former coordinator of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s team in Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has been detained two days before announced rallies to demand the Kremlin critic’s release from prison amid reports his health is rapidly deteriorating.
Denis Mikhailov wrote on Telegram that he was detained early on April 19 for taking part in an unsanctioned demonstration on January 31 protesting Navalny’s arrest.
If found guilty, Mikhailov could face up to 15 days in jail.
The current leader of Navalny’s team in the city, Irina Fatyanova, was sentenced to 10 days in jail on the same charge last week.
Mikhailov’s detainment came a day after Navalny’s supporters announced their plan to hold mass rallies across Russia on April 21 to demand Navalny’s immediate release.
Navalny, 44, was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany, where he was treated for a poisoning in Siberia in August with what was defined by European labs as a nerve agent. He has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, which the Kremlin has denied.
A Moscow court in February converted a 3 1/2-year suspended sentence on a charge that Navalny and his supporters call politically motivated to real jail time, saying he broke the terms of the original sentence by leaving Russia for Germany for the life-saving treatment he received.
The court reduced the time Navalny must spend in prison to just over 2 1/2 years because of time already served in detention.
Navalny went on a hunger strike in late March in protest of what he said was the refusal of prison authorities to allow him to receive proper medical care for acute back and leg pain just months after he recovered from the poison attack that nearly took his life.
The health of Putin’s most vocal critic has rapidly deteriorated in recent days and he could suffer cardiac arrest “any minute,” according to his personal doctor and three other physicians, including a cardiologist, who pleaded for access to Navalny in a letter to Russia’s Federal Prison Service.
Top advisers to the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany will hold consultations on April 19 to chart a path for a possible summit aimed at easing tensions in eastern Ukraine.
The talks come after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week called on Russia to reverse a troop buildup near the Ukrainian border and in occupied Crimea amid concerns over Moscow’s intentions.
A fragile cease-fire negotiated last summer in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Moscow-backed separatists has also unraveled in recent weeks, leaving at least 30 Ukrainian soldiers killed since the start of the year.
Zelenskiy has said he is seeking four-way talks under the so-called Normandy Format, involving Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany. France and Germany have been mediators in the Ukraine conflict since 2015.
To prepare for a possible summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zelenskiy met Macron in Paris on April 16. The two were later joined by Merkel via video link.
The German Chancellery said in a statement after the three-way talks that the sides shared concerns about the Russian troop buildup and “demanded the withdrawal of these reinforcements to reach a deescalation.”
The United States and NATO say the Russian military buildup is the largest since 2014, when Moscow forcibly seized Crimea and backed separatists in the east of Ukraine in a conflict that has killed more than 13,000 people.
The Kremlin denies its military movements are a threat and says they’re a sovereign issue.
Zelenskiy said in Paris that the goal of the political advisers’ meeting is to revive implementation of the so-called Minsk agreements aimed at reaching a durable cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, leading to steps toward a political solution to the conflict.
“The cease-fire initially worked. Now we are waiting for the restoration after the meeting of advisers,” he said of an arrangement reached last summer.
He also said he desired progress on an “all for all” prisoner exchange with separatist forces in the east of the country.
Ukraine’s position is that a cease-fire is a basic precondition for the implementation of the Minsk agreements and would pave the way for the implementation of other difficult provisions of the agreements, such as local elections in the separatist-controlled Donbas and control over the Ukrainian-Russian border.
Failure to advance Normandy Format talks may exacerbate tensions over Ukraine at a time when relations between the West and Russia are already deteriorating over a host of other issues, including the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called “Bountygate” story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan.
“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,” Greenwald tweeted.
A senior Czech official said Russia may have committed “an act of state terrorism” in his country. The Czech government expelled 18 Russian diplomats after intelligence reports linked Moscow to a deadly explosion at an ammunition depot in 2014. Czech police issued wanted notices for two suspected Russian agents. They are the same two men implicated in the attack using a Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury, England, in 2018 against Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal. Russia dismissed the allegations as “absurd” and said it would retaliate.
PRAGUE– The explosion was massive, blowing out windows of houses kilometers away, leaving a smoldering crater in the eastern Czech forest, not far from the border with Slovakia.
The blast, on October 16, 2014, destroyed a cache of ammunition and related weaponry. The bodies of two men who worked at the site were recovered nearly a month later. A second explosion occurred about two months later at nearby location, about 1 kilometer away.
The incident rattled Czech authorities, who were already watching warily as 1,700 kilometers away, Ukraine was gripped in a ferocious fight with a separatist uprising that was stoked, and fueled, by Russia. If there was a known connection at the time, it wasn’t ever revealed publicly by investigators.
On April 17, however, Czech officials made a stunning allegation, drawing a direct line between the explosions and the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU — specifically, a division known as Unit 29155 that has been linked to assassination attempts and other subversive actions across Europe.
Coming as tensions mount in Ukraine over a massive Russian buildup of troops near its border, and with the United States hitting Moscow with major new sanctions, expelling 10 diplomats, the Czech announcement shook Prague’s politics and was likely to further roil Western relations with Moscow.
“There is unequivocal evidence about the involvement of officers of the Russian intelligence service GRU…in the explosion of the ammunitions depot,” Prime Minister Andrej Babis told an unusual night news conference on April 17. He also said 18 Russians working at the Russian Embassy were being expelled.
“The Czech Republic is a sovereign state and must react accordingly to those unprecedented revelations,” he said.
The president of the Czech Senate, Milos Vystrcil, a political opponent and longtime critic of Babis, suggested that the explosion could be considered an act of “state terrorism,” saying, “It is necessary to react clearly, confidently, and harshly on it.”
Bulgarian businessman Emilian Gebrev
With the announcement, Czech authorities drew an indirect line not only to Ukraine’s war with Russia, but to a mysterious poisoning six months later in the Bulgarian capital that nearly killed an arms dealer named Emilian Gebrev.
Czech officials have not publicly announced a link between the explosions and Gebrev, but the public broadcaster Czech Radio and the news magazine Respekt cited unnamed security sources as saying Gebrev was involved.
Jan Hamacek, the Czech interior minister and current foreign minister, signaled that there was a connection with Bulgaria.
“Without specific details, I can confirm that international cooperation on this issue is under way, including cooperation with Bulgaria,” he said in an interview with CT24 Czech news.
And a top former Ukrainian security official also confirmed to RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service that Kyiv had sought Gebrev’s help in acquiring ammunition in 2014.
Russian officials denied the accusations; the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman called them “hocus-pocus.” Moscow was expected to expel a similar number of Czech diplomats in retaliation.
“I cannot recall any single event over the past 30 years of Czech independence, since 1993,” having this significance, Pavel Havlicek, a research fellow at the Prague-based Association for International Affairs, told RFE/RL. “This will have numerous political, diplomatic, social implications for Czech-Russian relations.
What Is Unit 29155?
The link between the ammunition blasts and the Gebrev poisoning, if confirmed, would add explosive new details to a growing body of evidence surrounding Unit 29155 and the GRU’s overall activities across Europe.
Two other divisions — known as Units 26165 and 74455 — have figured into several international cyberhacking investigations. Both were named by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation into the hacking of political party computers in the United States in 2016.
They were also linked to efforts to hack into the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the latter of which has played a key role in investigating the use of Novichok and similar Russia-designed nerve agents.
Photo Gallery:
A Look Back At The Deadly 2014 Czech Depot Blast That Prague Is Now Blaming On Russian Agents
The Czech Republic ordered 18 Russian diplomats to leave the country after Czech intelligence linked Russian military agents to a massive ammunition depot explosion near Vrbetice on October 20, 2014.
Unit 29155, meanwhile, burst into wide public awareness nearly three years after the Gebrev poisoning, when a former Russian military intelligence officer named Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia fell suddenly ill in Salisbury, England.
Skripal had been convicted of treason in Russia more than a decade earlier, for allegedly passing classified information to Western intelligence. He was kicked out of Russia in 2010 in a spy swap involving undercover Russian agents working in the United States.
British authorities determined that the substance Skripal was exposed to was Novichok, a powerful nerve agent first developed by Soviet scientists. British officials, using closed-circuit TV footage and other data, accused two men they said were Russian military agents of being behind the incident, which also killed a British woman.
Reporters and open-source investigators, including the group Bellingcat, later pinpointed the identities of the men as Aleksandr Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, which U.S. and British authorities ultimately confirmed.
In October 2019, RFE/RL revealed further details about Unit 29155 when it uncovered photographs from a wedding hosted by the unit’s commander and attended by one of the two alleged Novichok poisoners.
On April 17, at the same time that Babis and Czech officials were announcing the findings of the depot explosion investigation, Czech police released a statement saying Petrov and Boshirov had been in eastern Czech Republic in October 2014, around the time of the explosions, and said they were wanted for questioning.
The Bulgaria Connection
On April 28, 2015, while at a dinner at a luxury restaurant in Sofia, Gebrev began vomiting and was rushed to a military hospital, where he suffered from intense hallucinations. He ultimately fell into a coma. His son also fell ill suddenly, as did an executive at Gebrev’s arms trading company EMCO.
Gebrev ultimately recovered. Bulgarian investigators made little headway in identifying a cause, or culprit, for his illness — until some three years later, after the Skripal poisoning.
Working with the FBI, British intelligence,and other agencies, Bulgarian authorities concluded that a door handle of a car that belonged to Gebrev and which was parked in a Sofia parking garage had been smeared with a substance by an unknown man.
Bellingcat said that a known Russian operative who had traveled to England around the same time as the Skripal poisoning had also traveled to Bulgaria repeatedly. The man is believed to part of Unit 29155.
In January 2020, Bulgarian prosecutors charged three Russians for their alleged role in trying to poison Gebrev.
Gebrev’s role in trying broker weapons sales to Ukraine isn’t fully understood. News reports say Gebrev’s company, EMCO, indeed had signed a contract with the Ukrainian government in 2014 to supply artillery ammunition.
However, Viktor Yahun, who was deputy chief of the Secret Service of Ukraine, the country’s main intelligence unit, said that Kyiv in October 2014 had sought to acquire ammunition from Bulgaria around the time of the Czech depot explosions.
“This businessman who was poisoned and was allegedly poisoned by the Russian intelligence services, he was searching for such ammunition in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, and the best place for their transit storage before sending to Ukraine was, in fact, the Czech Republic,” Yahun said in an interview with RFE/RL.
“After the explosions, both Czech law enforcement and we ourselves had suspicions that it might not have been a coincidence,” he said.
Gebrev did not immediately respond to phone calls and text messages from RFE/RL’s Bulgarian Service seeking comment.
Despite announcing charges against the three Russians in January 2020, Bulgaria’s prosecutor-general nine months later announced that the probe had been suspended, a move that raised eyebrows inside and outside Bulgaria.
Boyko Noev, a former defense minister who is known to be close to Gebrev, said the revelation highlighted major problems with the Bulgarian investigation.
“The latest findings in the Czech Republic bring up again the question: Why was the investigation of Gebrev’s poisoning systematically hindered and finally stopped?” he said.
Czech Case
After stalling for nearly three years with insufficient evidence, the Czech investigation into the explosions gained new momentum after the 2018 Salisbury poisonings.
Czech relations with Moscow have been choppy in recent years, despite the open sympathies for Moscow by Czech President Milos Zeman.
Bilateral relations took a decided turn for the worse in early 2020, when Prague city officials dismantled a statue of a Russian World War II hero. The two countries exchanged heated rhetoric.
With the Czech Republic having one of the worst COVID-19 infection rates in Europe, the issue of acquiring the Russian Sputnik V vaccine has also divided the government in recent months.
It wasn’t clear why the Czech authorities decided to move against Russia now, however, and make their allegations public.
The news magazine Respekt said investigators last year received new information regarding the explosion, and the government’s intelligence committee had discussed the case just two weeks ago.
Czech government officials suggested that among the fallout from the scandal would be the tender to build a new 6 billion euro nuclear power plant. After the state energy group CEZ canceled a plan to build new reactors in 2014, the government has been entertaining bids from China, Russia, the United States, France, and other nations.
But Russia’s involvement has been seen as problematic. Last November, a working group including intelligence officers and Foreign Ministry officials called for the government to bar Russia and China from the bidding, saying both posed a strategic risk.
On April 18, Deputy Prime Minister Karel Havlichek said the Russian state atomic agency Rosatom would not be allowed to participate.
The expulsion of the Russian diplomats follows the expulsion of other Russian diplomats from the United States, announced as part of major set of new sanctions aimed in part at pressuring Russia to back down from a buildup of troops on Ukraine’s eastern borders.
While the Czech expulsions do not appear directly related to the U.S. expulsions, the Prague decision was quickly welcomed by the U.S. Embassy, which said in a post to Twitter late on April 17: “The United States stands with its steadfast ally, the Czech Republic. We appreciate their significant action to impose costs on Russia for its dangerous actions on Czech soil.”
RFE/RL senior correspondent Mike Eckel and Bulgarian Service Director Ivan Bedrov reported from Prague; RFE/RL Ukrainian Service reporter Olha Kamarova reported from Kyiv.
The Czech Republic ordered 18 Russian diplomats to leave the country after Czech intelligence linked Russian military agents to a massive ammunition depot explosion near Vrbetice on October 20, 2014.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis told reporters late on April 17 that the decision to expel the Russians was made on the basis of “unequivocal evidence” provided by investigators from the Czech intelligence and security services.
The Czech Republic “must react to these unprecedented revelations in a corresponding manner,” Babis said.
U.S. President Joe Biden on April 17 called the situation of jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny “unfair” after doctors and Navalny’s spokeswoman warned about his deteriorating health due to a hunger strike.
“It’s totally, totally unfair and totally inappropriate,” Biden told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, responding to a question about Navalny’s reportedly worsening condition. Biden also noted that his situation comes amid his hunger strike and after Navalny suffered through a poisoning last summer.
Navalny’s health has rapidly deteriorated and he could suffer cardiac arrest “any minute,” according to his personal doctor and three other physicians, including a cardiologist, who pleaded for access to Navalny in a letter to Russia’s Federal Prison Service.
The letter was posted on April 17 to the Twitter account of Navalny’s personal doctor, Anastasia Vasilyeva, who said the team of doctors expressed their readiness to organize negotiations and a consultation.
The doctors’ statement said that blood tests showed that Navalny’s potassium count had reached a “critical level.”
“This means both impaired renal function and that serious heart rhythm problems can happen any minute,” the letter said.
Navalny, 44, announced his hunger strike at the end of last month in protest at what he said was the refusal of prison authorities to allow him to receive proper medical care for acute back and leg pain.
The opposition leader said on April 16 that prison authorities were threatening to put him in a straightjacket to force-feed him.
The New York Times also weighed in on Navalny’s situation in an editorial on April 17, saying the decision about whether to allow doctors to see him “clearly rests with President Vladimir Putin,” whom they urged to comply with the doctors’ requests.
“Mr. Putin should understand that letting Mr. Navalny now perish in a labor camp would solidly confirm Mr. Putin as a ‘killer,’ a characterization President Biden recently said he shares, and as a vengeful despot willing to go to any lengths against his critics,” the newspaper’s editorial said. “Mr. Putin has been around long enough to know how that would play abroad, and among Russians already showing fatigue with his increasingly authoritarian and open-ended rule.
The editorial also noted that more than 70 prominent international writers, artists, and academics have signed a letter to Putin calling on him to ensure that Navalny receives the medical treatment to which he is entitled under Russian law.
The letter was published in British, French, German, and Italian newspapers. Among the prominent people who signed it are Nobel laureates in literature John Coetzee, Svetlana Aleksievich, Louise Glueck, Herta Mueller, and Orhan Pamuk; Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman; actors Stephen Fry, Benedict Cumberbatch, and David Duchovny; and authors Tom Stoppard, J.K. Rowling, and Michael Cunningham.
Navalny was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany where he was treated for poisoning in Siberia with what was defined by European labs as a nerve agent in August last year. He has accused Putin of ordering the poisoning, which the Kremlin has denied.
A Moscow court sentenced the opposition leader in February to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were politically motivated.
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman, wrote on Facebook on April 17 that the situation reminded her of the helplessness she felt after his poisoning.
“Now Aleksei is dying. In his condition it is a matter of days. And over the weekend, lawyers just can’t get to him, and no one knows what will happen on Monday,” she wrote.
Yarmysh wrote that she did not want mass protests expected to take place in the coming weeks to demand Navalny’s release to attract large crowds because he had died, and called on supporters to sign on to an online petition indicating they will attend in advance.
Saying that Putin only reacts to street protests, Yarmysh wrote that “this rally is no longer Navalny’s chance for freedom, it is a condition for his life.”
That Russia placed “bounties” on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was one of the most-discussed and consequential news stories of 2020. It was also, as it turns out, one of the most baseless — as the intelligence agencies who spread it through their media spokespeople now admit, largely because the tale has fulfilled and outlived its purpose.
The saga began on June 26, 2020, when The New York Times announced that unnamed “American intelligence officials” have concluded that “a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.” The paper called it “a significant and provocative escalation” by Russia. Though no evidence was ever presented to support the CIA’s claims — neither in that original story nor in any reporting since — most U.S. media outlets blindly believed it and spent weeks if not longer treating it as proven, highly significant truth.
Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with Moscow-based international affairs analyst Mark Sleboda about recent developments in Ukraine. Sleboda provides an in-depth explanation of the history leading to up to the current situation and analyses domestic factors in Ukraine that are pushing the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to pursue a more bellicose posture towards Russia.
Jailed Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s health has rapidly deteriorated and he could suffer cardiac arrest “any minute,” according to doctors demanding immediate access to the prominent Kremlin critic.
The plea came from Navalny’s personal doctor, Anastasia Vasilyeva, and three other doctors, including a cardiologist, in a letter to Russia’s Federal Prison Service officials that was posted to Vasilyeva’s Twitter account on April 17.
Navalny, 44, announced a hunger strike at the end of last month in protest at what he said was the refusal of prison authorities to allow him to receive proper medical care for acute back and leg pain.
The opposition leader said on April 16 that prison authorities were threatening to put him in a straightjacket to force-feed him.
The doctors’ statement said that blood tests showed that Navalny’s potassium count had reached a “critical level.”
“This means both impaired renal function and that serious heart rhythm problems can happen any minute,” the letter said.
Navalny was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany where he was treated for poisoning in Siberia with what was defined by European labs as a nerve agent in August last year. He has accused President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, which Kremlin has denied.
A Moscow court sentenced the opposition leader in February to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were politically motivated.
Amnesty International has sharply criticized a request by Russian prosecutors to have the Anti-Corruption Foundation of imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny banned as an “extremist” organization.
“Tens of thousands of peaceful activists and the staff of Aleksei Navalny’s organizations are in grave danger,” Natalia Zviagina, head of Amnesty’s Moscow office, said in an April 17 statement. “If their organizations are deemed ‘extremist’ they will all be at imminent risk of criminal prosecution.”
The Amnesty statement also decried Russia’s “long history of abusing ‘anti-extremism’ legislation and said that if the courts grant the prosecutors’ request on labeling Navalny’s organization “extremist,” “the result will likely be one of the most serious blows for the rights to freedom of expression and association in Russia’s post-Soviet history.”
On April 16, the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office asked the Moscow City Court to label as “extremist” three organizations tied to Navalny: the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the Citizens’ Rights Protection Foundation, and Navalny’s regional headquarters. Prosecutors said the organizations were “engaged in creating conditions for destabilizing the social and sociopolitical situation under the guise of their liberal slogans.”
Under Russian law, membership in or funding of an “extremist” organization is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The move is the latest in a series of assaults on Navalny since he suffered a nerve-agent poisoning attack in August 2020. He and his supporters blame that attack on Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives acting at the behest of authoritarian President Vladimir Putin.
Navalny spent weeks in Germany recuperating from the attack. When he returned to Russia in January, he was arrested and later sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were trumped up to hinder his political activity.
Navalny has been on a hunger strike in prison since March 31, demanding he be examined by his own doctor amid what his supporters have described as a “deliberate campaign” by prison officials to undermine his health.
On April 17, the French daily Le Monde and other leading European newspapers published an open letter signed by more than 70 actors, writers, directors, and other cultural figures demanding that Navalny be provided adequate medical treatment.
“As a Russian citizen, he is entitled to an examination and treatment by a doctor of his choice,” read the letter, which was signed by Nobel Prize laureates Herta Mueller, Louise Gluck, Orhan Pamuk, and Svetlana Alexievich, among others.
The pieces for a major surge of fighting in the Donbas continue to fall into place, highlighting an escalation of tensions between Russia and Ukraine that could potentially play out on the battlefield.
Analysts are loath to predict what will happen as Russia continues a massive military buildup near Ukraine’s borders and in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula seized by Russian forces in 2014.
But while the more optimistic view is that the show of force is a bluff intended to test the West’s resolve in supporting Kyiv in the face of Moscow’s support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, the moves heighten the risks that fighting that has been contained to the Donbas since 2014 could spill over into a broader conflict.
“If it’s just a ‘show of strength,’ Russia is doing an awful lot to make it wholly convincing,” Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), wrote on Twitter on April 14.
Rising Numbers
In recent weeks, Russia has unexpectedly boosted its troop presence near the conflict zone in Ukraine. As questions about Moscow’s motives mounted, military officials eventually said the forces were moved for exercises intended to test combat readiness in response to long-planned NATO drills in Europe.
Thousands of Russian troops have been transferred to a staging area south of Voronezh, located about 250 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, adding to forces already stationed there.
Analysis of open-source material by the global intelligence company Janes has identified tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, long-range artillery, rocket launchers, and Iskander short-range ballistic missile systems among the materiel that has been moved to the area since mid-March. U.S. and NATO officials have called it the largest military buildup in the region since Russia’s surprise occupation of Crimea and the start of fighting in the Donbas, which has killed more than 13,000 combatants and civilians since April 2014.
Janes, which specializes in military and defense analysis, has also identified army air-defense systems being transported to the region as well as a long-range telecommunications system and a field hospital.
Similar activity has been seen in the Rostov region, which borders parts of the Donbas held by Russia-backed separatists, and on the Tavrida highway to Crimea, with eyewitnesses telling RFE/RL that convoys includes combat vehicles and multiple-rocket launching systems.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Taran told the European Parliament this week that Russia would ultimately have 110,000 troops within 56 tactical battalions at its disposal in Crimea and near Ukraine’s borders, saying the built-up force could be used for “unpredictable, escalatory actions.”
The Russian Defense Ministry, meanwhile, announced it was sending additional naval vessels to reinforce the Crimea-based Black Sea Fleet. Without evidence, Moscow has accused Kyiv of planning an offensive against separatist forces in the Donbas and has warned that it would intervene if necessary to protect Russian citizens — an apparent reference to residents of the separatist-held areas who have been given Russian passports.
This all comes as a cease-fire brokered last summer has collapsed in the Donbas, with more than 25 Ukrainian soldiers killed in separatist-held areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions since the start of the year, compared to 50 in all of 2020, and separatist forces claiming that more than 20 of their fighters have been killed.
Exit Residents, Enter Russian Journalists
Heorhiy Tuka, a former Ukrainian deputy minister for what Kyiv calls the temporarily occupied territories, says that families in separatist-held areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are leaving for Russia in anticipation of a big war.
While Tuka told Current Time on April 14 that it was too early to say what might happen, he boiled things down to three likely scenarios:
A show of force intended to force a new round of negotiations regarding the conflict in the Donbas;
An escalation of fighting involving pinpoint strikes that would not result in Russian forces crossing its border with Ukraine and would force negotiations;
Or a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that would attempt to establish a corridor between Russian-controlled Crimea and separatist-held territories in the Donbas.
Tuka said he considered the second scenario to be the most likely, with the ultimate goal being the mandatory resumption of fresh water supplies to Crimea and direct negotiations between Kyiv and the two Russia-backed, self-declared governments in separatist-held areas of eastern Ukraine, demands that Moscow has been making since the war began in 2014.
We are inferior to the Russian Army in weapons and military equipment. On the other hand, the Ukrainian Army surpasses the enemy in motivation.”
At the same time, journalist Denys Kazanskiy, a member of the Ukrainian delegation to the trilateral contact group on the Donbas — which comprises Ukraine, Russia, and the OSCE — said that Russian pro-government media were entering the conflict zone.
Kazanskiy described this as an “alarming” sign, saying that “when such people appear, their arrival is usually marked with some kind of aggravation” that is blamed on Ukraine.
Despite the Russian military buildup and being told that Ukraine is preparing to invade, Kazanskiy said, he said he does not believe the people in the separatist-held areas are panicking, because they have seen this before.
“It’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” Kazanskiy said, noting that residents were told recently that the invasion would take place on March 15. “They shout all the time that Ukraine will attack, and advance, and that aggravates tensions.”
No Comparison
Should major hostilities break out again in the Donbas, the situation will have changed a lot since 2014, according to experts. Both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are seen as better prepared.
Kyiv has significantly boosted defense spending since 2014, has U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles in its arsenal, and boasts troop numbers of nearly 250,000 compared to 168,000 in 2013.
A Ukrainian soldier patrols near the front line with Russia-backed separatists near the city of Marinka in the eastern Donetsk region on April 12.
When fighting broke out in eastern Ukraine, the country estimated that it had only 5,000 combat-ready troops and had to call on volunteer militias to help in the war effort, and Russian forces no longer benefit from the element of surprise.
As for Russia, “the situation is fundamentally different,” according to military expert Yuriy Butusov, editor in chief of the Ukrainian website Censor.net.
“A military reform has been taking place in Russia since 2015,” Butusov told RFE/RL’s Russian Service. “It is aimed at strengthening the quality component of the armed forces, specifically for the conditions of a local war, military operations against Ukraine.”
Soldiers carry the coffin of Ihor Baitala, a service member of the Ukrainian armed forces who was killed at the beginning of April in the fighting against Russia-backed separatists in the country’s east, during a farewell ceremony in Lviv on April 10. More than 25 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed so far this year.
Rather than maintaining understaffed units, he said, “the Russian Army has moved on to maintaining a large number of full-fledged, ready-for-immediate-action units that are in a higher degree of combat readiness.”
Ultimately, however, Butusov said that the lack of structural reforms in the Ukrainian military would make it difficult for it in a mobile war with Russia.
“We are inferior to the Russian Army in weapons and military equipment,” he said. “On the other hand, the Ukrainian Army surpasses the enemy in motivation.”
Former Ukrainian deputy minister Tuka gave a similarly dour assessment of Ukraine’s chances in a war with Russia, saying, among other things, that Ukraine’s air-defense system is in “a deplorable state.”
“You have to speak objectively and honestly,” he told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. “The fact is that if assets of the Russian armed forces are used — such as aviation, missile forces, or long-range artillery — then I have grave doubts .”
Another factor in the tension over the Russian military buildup is Moscow’s severely strained relations with the West.
The announcement of new U.S. sanctions on Russia on April 15 may make the Kremlin more cautious about actions that would further aggravate those ties, Aleksandr Baunov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote on Twitter.
“But for now, Russia will make no notable overtures of peace,” he wrote. “Accordingly, the escalation over the Donbas may continue.”
Written by Michael Scollon with reporting by Current Time correspondent Vladimir Mikhailov and Mark Krutov of RFE/RL’s Russian Service
Two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut have landed safely in the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan following their six-month stint at the International Space Station (ISS).
Cosmonauts Sergei Ryzhikov and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and astronaut Kathleen Rubins touched down as scheduled in the early morning hours of April 17, according to a live broadcast on the television channel of Russia’s Roskosmos space agency.
It was the first ISS mission for Kud-Sverchkov and the second for Ryzhikov and Rubins.
On April 22, the private firm SpaceX is scheduled to launch a four-person mission to the ISS, made up of astronauts from the United States, France, and Japan. It will be the first manned SpaceX mission to reuse the Falcon rocket and the Dragon crew capsule.
NASA recently began using U.S. private companies for transport to the ISS after years of relying on the Russian space program to reach the orbiting laboratory.
NASA has chosen SpaceX to build a lunar lander that the U.S. space agency says will return Americans to the moon. SpaceX beat out proposals by Blue Origin and Dynetics to win the $2.89 billion contract, NASA said on April 16.
NASA declined to provide a target launch date for the mission, known as Artemis.
SpaceX is developing a vehicle called Starship that will be used for the moon mission. A number of prototypes of the bullet-shaped 50-meter-tall rocket have exploded or crashed during test flights with no crew.
But CEO Elon Musk has been undeterred, saying Starship will succeed at carrying people and other tasks such as putting satellites into orbit.
Jailed Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny said on April 16 that prison authorities have threatened to put him in a straitjacket to force-feed him unless he halts his hunger strike.
Navalny, 44, announced a hunger strike at the end of last month in protest at what he said was the refusal of prison authorities to allow him to receive proper medical care for acute back and leg pain.
In an Instagram post, Navalny said an official told him that blood tests showed his health was deteriorating and threatened to force-feed him if he continues his hunger strike.
“And then she detailed the joys of force-feeding to me. Straitjacket and other pleasures,” the politician said, adding that he urged the officials not to do it, “pointing to a clause in the law.”
Navalny did not elaborate on what he meant by “other pleasures.”
Navalny was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany where he was treated for poisoning in Siberia with what was defined by European labs as a nerve agent in August last year. He has accused President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, which the Kremlin has denied.
A Moscow court sentenced the opposition leader in February to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were politically motivated.
Russian prosecutors have asked a Moscow court to label jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny’s anti-corruption organization and its regional offices as “extremist” organizations.
It accused Russia’s largest opposition network of creating conditions for “changing the foundations of the constitutional order.”
The extremist label, if approved, would severely limit Navalny’s allies and activists from organizing, criminalizing such things as calling for or participating in protests. Navalny’s aides and organizations are already subject to frequent police raids and arrests over their political activities.
Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) exposes state corruption and his network of regional offices are located in dozens of cities.
The latest move against Navalny’s opposition movement comes as his aides are pushing for massive nationwide protests in the coming weeks.
Navalny was sentenced in February to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were politically motivated. He was arrested in January after returning from Germany, where he was treated for the poison attack that European laboratories said involved a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group.
His arrest in January triggered some of the largest nationwide protests in years and a harsh crackdown.
Navalny, 44, announced a hunger strike at the end of last month in protest at what he said was the refusal of prison authorities to allow him to receive proper medical care for acute back and leg pain.
Russia’s reported plans to restrict maritime traffic in parts of the Black Sea for six months as it holds military maneuvers would be “unjustified” and “destabilizing,” NATO said on April 16, demanding Moscow allow Ukraine freedom of navigation.
The move to block traffic in the Black Sea was also swiftly condemned by Ukraine and the European Union. Tensions between Russia and Ukraine are elevated as Moscow masses troops near Ukraine’s border and on the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.
“Russia’s ongoing militarization of Crimea, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Azov are further threats to Ukraine’s independence, and undermine the stability of the broader region,” a spokeswoman for NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement. “We call on Russia to de-escalate immediately, stop its pattern of provocations, and respect its international commitments.”
Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency, citing a Defense Ministry statement, reported that Moscow plans to close parts of the Black Sea to foreign military ships and other state vessels from April 24 until October 31 to conducted navy drills.
The restrictions would apply to the western tip of the Crimean Peninsula, its southern coastline from Sevastopol to Hurzuf, and a “rectangle” off the Kerch Peninsula near the Opuksky Nature Reserve.
Restrictions
Such restrictions could prevent access to Ukrainian ports in the Sea of Azov, which is connected to the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait.
“We are concerned by reports that Russia plans to restrict access to parts of the Black Sea and the Kerch Strait. This would be an unjustified move, and part of a broader pattern of destabilizing behavior by Russia,” the NATO statement said. “We call on Russia to ensure free access to Ukrainian ports in the Sea of Azov, and allow freedom of navigation.”
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry blasted the restrictions as a “usurpation of the sovereign rights of Ukraine.”
It also stressed that under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, “Russia must neither obstruct or halt transit through the international strait to ports in the Sea of Azov.”
The European Union called the Russian provocation “highly worrying” and echoed NATO’s call for Moscow to allow the free passage of ships.
“The intention by the Russian Federation to close certain areas of the Black Sea for navigation until October 2021 under the pretext of military exercises is highly worrying,” said the office of the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell.
“The European Union expects Russia to ensure unhindered and free passage to and from the Sea of Azov in accordance with international law,” Borrell’s spokesman, Peter Stano, said in a statement.
The Kerch Strait became a scene of confrontation in 2018 after Russia seized three Ukrainian ships there over alleged violations of its territorial waters.
The Kerch Strait is also the site of a much-hyped 19-kilometer bridge connecting Crimea with mainland Russia that Moscow opened in 2018.
WASHINGTON — Campaigning last year, U.S. President Joe Biden promised to be tougher on Russia than his predecessor, and so far he has been taking steps to live up to his words: Since he took office on January 20, the United States has hit the Kremlin with two rounds of sanctions over “harmful” acts carried out by Moscow during Donald Trump’s presidential term.
The latest measures, announced on April 15, were wide-ranging: the White House announced the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats and imposed sanctions on six Russian technology companies as well as 32 other individuals and entities.
It also targeted ruble-denominated sovereign debt, a key ingredient in Russia’s economic activity and the topic of animated discussions about potential new sanctions for months.
The measures received praise from political analysts and members of Congress who said they sent a strong signal to Russian President Vladimir Putin, though some called for tougher measures, including sanctions to stop a controversial Russian natural-gas pipeline to Europe, Nord Stream 2.
But the Russian market’s reaction was muted, indicating the punishments will not be as painful economically as some had expected. The ruble even rebounded against the dollar as Biden pulled his punches on the debt sanctions, analysts said, leaving their impact uncertain.
“Still more bark than bite,” was the verdict in the title of an April 15 note from Evghenia Sleptsova, an economist at U.K.-based research firm Oxford Economics.
Since Biden emerged last spring as the Democratic presidential nominee and polls pointed to his victory over Trump in November 2020, anticipation had been growing that the United States would impose harsher sanctions on Russia’s economy, in particular by restricting the ability of U.S. banks and investors to buy Russian sovereign debt — bonds the government sells to raise cash for its coffers.
The logic for doing so was clearly laid out by the Biden administration on April 15, when the new sanctions were announced: “There’s no credible reason why the American people should directly fund Russia’s government when the Putin regime has repeatedly attempted to undermine our sovereignty,” a senior official said.
‘Largely Symbolic’
The smaller the pool of investors ready to buy Russian sovereign debt, the more expensive it becomes for the Kremlin to raise the money it needs, a development that has a ripple effect throughout the economy, affecting companies and consumers.
But the Biden administration chose to go with a relatively mild variety of sovereign debt sanctions.
When it takes effect on June 14, the measure will prevent U.S. banks from buying ruble-denominated, government bonds, known as OFZs, directly from Russia. It will not stop them from buying those same bonds on the secondary market, from Russian banks.
The effect on the market for ruble sovereign debt is likely to be “largely symbolic,” Sleptsova wrote in the note.
Investors’ expectation that the Biden administration could ban all ruble-denominated debt drove foreign ownership of OFZs to a six-year low of 20 percent at the beginning of April, down from 35 percent at the start of 2020. The large-scale selling of OFZs by foreigners drove the ruble to 80 to the dollar, near a record low, helping stoke inflation in Russia.
Russia currently has about $185 billion in outstanding OFZ debt, according to Vladimir Tikhomirov, a Moscow-based economist for investment bank BCS Global Markets, putting foreign ownership at about $37 billion.
U.S. investors own roughly between $12 billion and $14 billion of OFZs, he said, with European and Asian investors accounting for most of the remaining foreign-owned debt.
The sanctions don’t obligate non-American foreign investors to follow suit in steering clear of the OFZs. But Brian O’Toole, a former Treasury Department official and now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, said that major European banks often implement U.S. Treasury sanctions, meaning that the potential knock-on effect could be greater.
The Russian government is dependent on ruble-denominated debt.
However, when the Trump administration imposed a similar ban in 2019 on U.S.-dollar debt issued by the Russian government, there was no significant impact.
Sleptsova said that the Trump-era sanctions “did little to dent the Kremlin’s access to foreign funding” as Russia turned to issuing more Euro-denominated bonds. In fact, she added, percentage of foreign investors owning sovereign debt issued by Russia in foreign currencies actually increased after those sanctions were announced.
Russia Scales Back
The Russian government is much more dependent on ruble-denominated debt for funding its budget than on dollar-denominated debt, potentially making the new sanctions more robust.
A senior Biden administration official suggested the White House is hoping for a substantial knock-on effect.
“Judging from history, removing U.S. investors as buyers in this market can create a broader chilling effect that raises Russia’s borrowing costs, along with capital flight and a weaker currency,” the official said on condition of anonymity after the new sanctions were announced. “And all of these forces have a material impact on Russia’s growth and inflation outcomes.”
At the same time, the choice of a milder form of sovereign-debt sanctions may have been calculated to land a softer blow for now while keeping a more powerful punch in reserve.
In comments late on April 15, Biden said the United States “could have gone further” with the sanctions, but that he chose not to because he wants to avoid a “cycle of escalation and conflict.” But he warned that if Russia “continues to interfere with our democracy, I am prepared to take further actions to respond.”
Elina Ribakova, deputy chief economist at the Institute of International Finance in Washington, said that could make some U.S. banks and investors cautious in the “near term” about buying Russian ruble debt.
“Some compliance departments will say, ‘You know what, it’s just not worth it,’” she said.
But as they currently stand, she said, the debt sanctions will have just a “minor symbolic impact.”
Oil Income
Putin has been preparing for a Western ban on sovereign debt ever since the United States and its allies began imposing sanctions on Russia in 2014, after it seized Crimea and backed fighters in eastern Ukraine. His government has curtailed spending growth and built up the nation’s foreign currency reserves to nearly $600 billion.
A plunge in world oil prices combined with those sanctions hit Russia’s economy hard in 2015. But this year, it is benefitting once again this year from a jump in the price of oil, its main export commodity.
The government had planned to borrow 3.7 trillion rubles ($48.5 billion) this year assuming an average oil price of $45 a barrel. To date, the oil price has been averaging near $60, potentially generating more than $25 billion in additional budget revenue, Russia’s Finance Ministry said in March.
In response to the new U.S. sanctions, Russia announced it would cut its 2021 borrowing needs by nearly a quarter, or by about $11.5 billion. The cut is greater than the proportion of its debt owned by foreigners.
“If we don’t see a meltdown of the global economy and a significant drop in oil prices, then Russia really doesn’t need to borrow that much,” said Tikhomirov. “So, they can easily adjust their policy and curb their needs for new debt.”
He said the sanctions would not impact his forecast for Russian economic growth.
Kiev, Ukraine – Within three months of the ascendancy of Joseph Biden to the presidency of the United States, the world teeters on the edge of nuclear war, whether by design or accident, as Russia reports that the U.S. is placing considerable pressure on Ukraine to attack the independent republics of the Donbass for which Russia provides logistical support. The U.S. European Command has raised its alert status to the highest level and warned of a “potential imminent crisis.”
Mounting tension is an entirely foreseeable outcome of the sludge-like flow over the past four years of Democratic Party fables about Russia, RussiaGate, Ukraine, and U.S. national security, on behalf of the Incubus, a sordid network of military, defense and surveillance industries, militarized academe and think tanks, and complicit Western mainstream media.
MOSCOW — The team of imprisoned Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny has published details of what it alleges is a lavish residence belonging to President Vladimir Putin and kept from public view, the latest salvo in the opposition’s push to boost expected turnout for planned protests and maintain pressure on the Kremlin ahead of parliamentary elections expected this fall.
The video investigation, which had attracted 2.7 million views on YouTube within the first 20 hours of its publication on April 15, alleges that Putin’s fourth official residence, on 150 hectares of land located near Lake Valdai northwest of Moscow, contains sumptuous interiors and includes a large spa center not revealed to Russian taxpayers.
“Why on earth are we financing the construction of Putin’s private spa-complexes?” Navalny aide Maria Pevchikh asks in the video. “Why on earth are billions of rubles of taxpayer money going to one person’s decompression, mud-therapy and antiaging procedures?”
Investigations released by Navalny and his team over the past year have been viewed tens of millions of times on YouTube. The new probe comes just weeks after separate videos shed light on a $1.35 billion Black Sea palace allegedly built for Putin and the circumstances around Navalny’s poisoning in Siberia last August, which the anti-corruption crusader blames on Putin and the Federal Security Service.
Citing property records, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) says part of the land is formally registered to a company called Praym LLC, which, according to the FBK, is owned by billionaire banker Yury Kovalchuk, the main shareholder of Bank Rossiya and one of Putin’s oldest friends.
FBK says that there are about 80 buildings on the land leased from Praym, including a four-story, 3,500-square-meter mansion, a Chinese-style pavilion, a Russian-style izba (wooden cabin), baths, saunas, a stable, a golf course, and a VIP restaurant that includes a cinema, bowling, billiards, and a small casino. The property also has its own church. Near the main building is an even larger one containing a spa complex with two underground floors and a total area of nearly 7,000 square meters (almost 75,350 square feet), according to FBK.
Navalny, Putin’s most-vocal critic, was sentenced in February to 2 1/2 years in prison on charges he says were fabricated to sideline and discredit him. He was arrested in January after returning from Germany, where he was treated for the poison attack that European laboratories said involved a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group.
WATCH: Pole Dancing And Fancy Toilet Brushes: Millions Watch Navalny Video On Alleged ‘Putin Palace’
The new video also comes amid a push by Navalny’s aides, who have pledged to continue opposition activism, to boost expected turnout at fresh protests slated to take place in coming weeks. Anti-government rallies across Russia in January elicited a violent law enforcement crackdown and a concerted legal campaign against Navalny’s supporters throughout the country, which continues to reverberate with new raids and arrests almost three months after the demonstrations ended.
Citing the violence deployed by police, and the clear dangers faced by protesters, Navalny’s aides in early February called for a cessation of street demonstrations in favor of a redoubled focus on compiling evidence of state corruption ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for September, which will occur against the backdrop of falling ratings for ruling party United Russia. The decision, which came as hundreds of protesters languished in squalid jails awaiting trial, prompted indignation from some Navalny supporters.
On March 23, Navalny’s aides placated some of the disillusioned supporters with a new initiative aimed at gauging protest potential. They launched a website on which Russians could register anonymously to take part in the next protest wave in support of Navalny, marking their location on an interactive map. Once the number of registered participants reaches 500,000, the team said, they will set a date for fresh protests.
Pevchikh and Georgi Alburov, her co-host in the latest video, ended the clip by urging viewers to sign up on the protest website.
But the same day the video was released, as the online protest tally reached 430,000, Navalny’s team was forced to apologize after reports emerged that thousands of e-mail addresses belonging to registered participants had been leaked online, apparently by hackers who then messaged the participants dismissing Navalny’s team as “losers.”
Calling the leak “a retaliatory blow” in response to the latest video, Navalny aide Ivan Zhdanov said the leak contained only e-mail addresses, adding that their owners faced few consequences beyond receiving unsolicited messages discrediting Navalny and the broader opposition movement.
“We apologize for any nuisance caused,” Zhdanov wrote in a public message on the messenger Telegram. “We’ll do everything to make sure this never happens again.”
The Biden administration’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan is a wise and morally courageous one. It refuses to inherit and continue a disastrous American tradition in foreign and security policy: the obsession with defending meaningless U.S. “credibility” (aka prestige), irrespective of real national interests and of the cost in American lives and money.
Previous U.S. “strategy” in Afghanistan was a kind of zombie policy: in reality dead, but still walking around because nobody in Washington could bring themselves to bury it.
The obsession with mortal threats from Russia is a zombie dating back to the Cold War, and should have been buried when that struggle ended.
MOSCOW — Two of four editors of the student magazine Doxa have appealed a Moscow court’s decision to place then in de facto house arrest on a charge of “engaging minors in actions that might be dangerous” over a video related to unsanctioned rallies to protest the incarceration of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.
Pavel Chikov of the human rights group Agora quoted lawyers for editors Armen Aramyan and Vladimir Metyolkin as saying on April 16 that they filed an appeal against the court’s order for the two journalists and their colleagues, Alla Gutnikova and Natalya Tyshkevich, to remain in their homes from midnight until 11:59 p.m. for two months, giving them only one minute to be outside each day.
It was not clear whether Gutnikova and Tyshkevich planned to appeal the ruling as well.
The four were detained for questioning at the Investigative Committee after their homes and the magazine’s offices were searched over the video, which the magazine posted online in January.
The video questioned teachers’ moves to warn students about possible repercussions they could face for participating in unsanctioned rallies on January 23 and 31 in protest of Navalny’s arrest.
Doxa editors say the video was deleted from the magazine’s website following a demand from Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor to remove it.
More than 10,000 supporters of Navalny were detained across Russia during and after the January rallies.
Many of the detained men and women were either fined or handed several-day jail terms. At least 90 were charged with criminal offenses and several have been fired by their employers.
Human rights groups have called on Moscow repeatedly to stop targeting journalists because they are covering the protests or express solidarity with protesters, since both are protected under the right to freedom of expression.
“Instead of targeting journalists, the authorities should hold accountable police who attack journalists and interfere with their work,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement on February 3.
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport on January 17 upon his arrival from Germany, where he was recovering from a poisoning in Siberia in August 2020 that several European laboratories concluded was a military-grade chemical nerve agent.
Navalny has insisted that his poisoning was ordered directly by President Vladimir Putin, which the Kremlin has denied.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
Navalny’s 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from that case was converted to a jail term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given the amount of time he had been held in detention.
A Russian court conjures up an “illusion of leniency” with a ruling that lets four young arrestees leave their homes for one minute a day, part of a continuing crackdown ahead of elections. Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny’s troubles persist in prison. Tension rises as Russia builds up forces near Ukraine and the United States offers Vladimir Putin a summit — and sanctions.
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
‘Freedom is Better’
Dmitry Medvedev, whose single-term presidency stands for some as amonument to false hopes for change in Russia, famously said that “freedom is better than unfreedom.”
That may seem obvious, but it was taken as a signal of possible change at the time nonetheless, and he repeated it shortly before he stepped down in 2012 and handed Russia’s reins formally back to Vladimir Putin, who first became president in 2000 and may continue and now has the option of seeking to stay in office until 2036.
And now, nine years after Putin returned to the Kremlin, a Russian court has issued a ruling that seems to stand Medvedev’s maxim on its head: It has ordered four editors of a student magazine who have been arrested in connection with a video related to protests over opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s jailing to remain in their homes for all but one minuteof freedom each day for two months.
The four — Armen Aramyan, Alla Gutnikova, Vladimir Metyolkin, and Natalya Tyshkevich — will be allowed out from 11:59 p.m. to midnight.
The restriction, imposed by Moscow’s Basmanny district court on April 14 at the behest of prosecutors, is a pretrial measure. The editors of student magazine Doxa are charged with engaging minors in potentially harmful activities and could be sentenced to three years in prison if convicted.
A single protester, as allowed by law, demands “hands off Doxa” outside the court in Moscow.
The video they were charged over questioned teachers’ warnings to students about possible repercussions they could face for participating in unsanctioned rallies on January 23 and 31.
Normally, if the Russian authorities want to refrain from jailing an arrestee ahead of trial but also do not want to leave them free, a court will order house arrest. In the case of the Doxa detainees, the court ordered that their movements be restricted — a custody measure that, at least on paper, seems substantially more lenient.
In this case, however, the restrictions are “in essence even more severe than house arrest,” said Irina Biryukova, a lawyer with the Russian legal-aid NGO Public Verdict. For one thing, suspects under house arrest are allowed occasional outing such as to get fresh air, go to the doctor, or go to a house of worship.
“In my view, this is just the illusion of leniency,” Biryukova told Mediazona, a Russian outlet that specializes in reporting on courts, prisons, and the law. “‘Restrictions on Certain Activities’ sounds far softer than ‘House Arrest.’”
Kirill Koroteyev, a lawyer at the Russian human rights organization Agora, said that the one-minute restriction might violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
It can also be interpreted as a form of trolling — something that the Russian state seems to have made part of its arsenal of measures in both domestic and foreign policy in the past few years.
Trouble Speaking
How else to explain the imprisoned Navalny’s statement earlier this month that his jailers were trying to undermine the hunger strike he declared on March 31 by roasting chicken near his cell and slipping candy into the pockets of his clothing.
Or, for that matter, their repeated assurances that his condition is “satisfactory.”
Yulia Navalnaya is worried about her husband. (file photo)
Navalny, who is serving a 2 1/2-year prison term on charges he calls absurd, has accused his jailers of a deliberate effort to undermine his health. After visiting him in prison on April 13, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, said he had lost 17 kilograms, speaks “with difficulty,” and had to lie down and rest repeatedly during their telephone call across a glass barrier.
“I know that he is not going to give up…. But after the visit with Aleksei, I worry about him even more,” she said.
The Doxa case is likely to underscore the rift between the Russian state and millions of its younger citizens, who polls show are substantially less likely to want Putin to stay in office after his current term expires in 2024 and present a problem for the ruling United Russia party in parliamentary elections slated for September.
The prosecution of the editors is part of a wide-scale crackdown on government critics, perceived Kremlin opponents, and civil society that has intensified since Navalny returned to Russia from Germany, where he was treated following a near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning in Siberia in August that he blames on Putin and the Federal Security Service (FSB).
More than 100,000 people protested nationwide on two successive weekends after his arrest at the airport on arrival, and police detained some 10,000 people in a violent response.
Protest Echo
The arrest and imprisonment of Navalny has increased the already severe strains in ties between Russia and the West, long seen by both as being close to, at, or below Cold War lows since 2014, when Moscow seized the Crimean Peninsula and fomented separatism across much of Ukraine, helping ignite a war that has killed more than 13,000 people in the Donbas, where Moscow-backed forces hold parts of two provinces.
Tensions over Ukraine have increased substantially in recent weeks, with a flare-up in fighting and a series of highly visible military movements by Moscow, which has sent additional forces into occupied Crimea and into areas close to the Ukrainian border in southwestern Russia.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy (center) visits the troops along the front line in eastern Ukraine on April 8.
The movements have raised questions about Russia’s intentions, which are unclear.
“It appears [to be] a coercive demonstration, but the chance that it is not remains significant,” Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security, wrote on Twitter on April 14. “It is too early, and overly optimistic, to assume the situation will de-escalate.”
If Russia’s intentions are unclear, so are its excuses. Since the military movements started getting noticed, Russian officials have offered several sometimes conflicting — and, in the eyes of many analysts, unconvincing — explanations.
They include claims that Russia is merely holding military exercises, assertions that Ukraine is threatening to retake control over the separatist-held parts of the Donbas, and a statement from Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu that NATO is conducting “military activities that threaten Russia.”
Shoigu appeared to be referring to NATO military exercises. But his remarks were undermined in advance by Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, who said that Russian military moves on its own territory pose no threat to any other country. If that’s the case, though, then the same should be true of NATO moves on alliance territory.
One of the theories about Russia’s buildup is that it’s in part an attempt to test U.S. President Joe Biden early in his term and pressure his administration not to challenge Russia in a number of ways, such as by stepping up U.S. support for Ukraine and imposing new sanctions on Moscow.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden (left) shakes hands with then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during their meeting in Moscow in March 2011.
But sanctions came. Two days after Biden and Putin held their second telephone call since the U.S president took office in January, his administration announced the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats and sanctions against dozens of Russian people and companies, in response to alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election and the breach of government systems in the Solarwinds hack, as well as human rights violations and other actions in Crimea.
The sanctions seemed to be in line with remarks Biden has made about Russia policy, and with the White House readout of Biden’s phone conversation with Putin on April 13: Biden “made clear that the United States will act firmly in defense of its national interests in response to Russia’s actions,” it said, but at the same time he “reaffirmed his goal of building a stable and predictable relationship with Russia consistent with U.S. interests.”
Biden also “proposed a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia,” the White House statement said.
An observer for Moscow tabloid Moskovsky komsomolets wrote that Biden was “gaslighting” Putin by proposing a summit and imposing new sanctions two days later.
Summits And Sanctions
But Biden stated that he was not trying to “kick off a cycle of escalation and conflict” with Russia, saying that the United States “could have gone further” but that he chose not to for that reason, at the same time adding that if Russia “continues to interfere with our democracy, I am prepared to take further actions to respond.”
“The message here is that the Biden administration is deliberate and considerate when it comes to attacks on our political processes, security, and the sovereignty of our allies,” Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert at the Wilson Center think tank, wrote on Twitter shortly after the sanctions were announced.
“It will continue to impose costs on Russia for its malign activities but with the offer of a US-Russia summit this week, also a reminder that Putin has the keys to rolling back these costs. Pull out of Ukraine. Stop meddling in other countries’ affairs,” Jankowicz wrote. “Unlikely to happen, of course, but the off-ramp is there.”
U.S. Army personnel march in a military parade marking Ukraine’s Independence Day in Kyiv in August 2018.
It’s possible, or course, that Putin will steer clear of a summit, at least for the “coming months” mentioned in the offer, but blow past the off-ramp when it comes to what a White House statement called “Russia’s harmful foreign activities.”
Before the sanctions were announced, Peskov said that additional punishments would “not be conducive” to a Biden-Putin summit, but he left the door open. For years, Putin has used the United States as a bugbear to bolster his image — while also using meetings with senior world leaders, and in particular the president of Moscow’s former Cold War foe, tothe same purpose.
But a summit, if it happens, is weeks or month away, and whether it happens will depend on numerous other factors in addition to U.S. sanctions and their severity, not least the next developments in Ukraine.
In the short term, the U.S. measures seem certain to focus even more attention on the Russian forces gathering in Crimea and close to Ukraine’s eastern border, as Kyiv, Washington, and the West watch for Kremlin responses to the new sanctions.
Even as observers worry that Moscow may be spoiling for a fight, and hoping that Kyiv will provide a pretext with some aggressive move, Russia has laid the groundwork to blame Ukraine, the United States, and the European Union for any further escalation of hostilities.
“If there is any aggravation, we of course will do everything to ensure our security and the safety of our citizens, wherever they are,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on April 13, apparently referring in part to the Donbas residents whom Russia has given passports — that it, citizenship. “But Kyiv and its allies in the West will be entirely responsible for the consequences of a hypothetical exacerbation.”
One short tweet seems to sum up what some of those who disagree with Ryabkov’s remark may be thinking.
“Pre-emptive plea,” Nate Schenkkan, director of research strategy at Freedom House, wrote, “if Russia attacks Ukraine (again) to please not say it is in response to US sanctions.”
RFE/RL has filed an urgent petition with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to block Russia from enforcing penalties for violations of its controversial “foreign agent” law that could cost the broadcaster more than $1 million.
The broadcaster said in a news release late on April 15 that it had asked the court in Strasbourg to grant interim measures ordering Russia to refrain from enforcing hundreds of “administrative protocols” that it has brought or threatened to bring against the media organization under the law, which critics say is aimed at muzzling independent media, especially RFE/RL.
The interim measures would be in place until the court can rule on the Russian government’s actions, RFE/RL said.
The “foreign agent” laws apply to foreign-funded media and to nongovernmental organizations that have been judged by the government as engaging in political activity and that receive foreign funding.
The laws have been widely criticized as aiming to undermine civil society and discredit critical reporting and dissent.
While RFE/RL has complied with all of its legal obligations under the “foreign agent” law, it has declined to implement the new labeling requirement established by the state media-monitoring agency Roskomnadzor.
The measures are “clearly intended to damage its reputation and viability as an independent media organization in Russia,” RFE/RL’s news release said.
As a result, Roskomnadzor has filed 390 violation cases, so-called protocols, against RFE/RL’s Moscow bureau and its general director, Andrei Shary, over a period of three months. Fines from those actions total approximately $1,430,000.
Roskomnadzor is due to begin filing an additional 130 cases against RFE/RL and Shary on April 16, with additional fines estimated at nearly $1 million, RFE/RL said.
If the fines are not paid, Russian authorities have the power to place RFE/RL into insolvency and/or to block access to its media sites, while Shary faces the prospect of a prison sentence of up to two years and personal bankruptcy.
RFE/RL argues that Russia’s actions violate the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of the press that are protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and says that if the court does not act now, its Moscow bureau and its general director “will suffer irreversible harms.”
RFE/RL also warned that, left unchecked, the Kremlin’s campaign will have a chilling effect on what is left of independent media in Russia.
“RFE/RL will not be put in a position of undermining freedom of speech and journalistic integrity,” RFE/RL President Jamie Fly said.
“We will not allow Roskomnadzor and the Kremlin to make editorial decisions about how we engage our audiences in Russia,” he was quoted as saying.
RFE/RL hopes the ECHR “will view these actions by the government of Russia for what they are: an attempt to suppress free speech and the human rights of the Russian people, and a dangerous precedent at a time when independent media are under assault around the globe,” Fly said.
Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly. It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents,” and to submit to audits.
Later modifications of the law targeted foreign-funded media. In 2017, the Russian government placed RFE/RL’s Russian Service, known locally as Radio Svoboda, six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, and Current Time on the list.
Since October, Roskomnadzor has ordered broadcasters designated as foreign agents to add a lengthy statement to news reports, social-media posts, and audiovisual materials specifying that the content was created by an outlet “performing the functions of a foreign agent.”
RFE/RL is an editorially independent media company funded by a grant from the U.S. Congress through the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Each week, nearly 7 million people access RFE/RL’s news portals in Russia.
RFE/RL’s Russian-language news services are the only international media outlets with a physical presence in Russia to have been designated “foreign agents.”
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will hold talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on April 16 in a show of support for Kyiv amid concerns about a buildup of Russian troops along the border with Ukraine and in occupied Crimea.
Macron will receive Zelenskiy for lunch in Paris and both leaders will then talk with Merkel on a videoconference call, the French presidency said.
“Ukraine’s sovereignty is under threat,” Macron’s office said. “All our work is aimed at avoiding an escalation and defusing tensions.”
Zelenskiy said the discussions in Paris will help prepare so-called Normandy Format talks involving the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany to try to resolve the Ukraine conflict. France and Germany have been mediators in the conflict since 2015.
Recent photographs, video, and other data suggest major movements of Russian armed units toward or near Ukraine’s border and into Crimea, fueling concerns that Russia is preparing to send forces into Ukraine.
The United States and NATO have described it as the largest Russian military buildup since 2014, when Moscow illegally annexed Crimea and backed separatists in the east of Ukraine in a conflict that has killed more than 13,000 people.
Zelenskiy’s meeting with Macron and Merkel comes after Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called for stronger Western backing, saying that “words of support aren’t enough.”
Kuleba, speaking on April 15 after talks in Kyiv with his counterparts from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, asked the Baltic states to reach out to other European Union and NATO members about offering “practical assistance” to Kyiv.
Kuleba accused Moscow of “openly threatening Ukraine with war and the destruction of Ukrainian statehood” and said it was necessary to show Russia that its actions in eastern Ukraine could have “very painful” consequences.
“The red line of Ukraine is the state border. If Russia crosses the red line, then it will have to suffer,” he warned.
Russia’s Defense Ministry has said the troops are merely responding to “threatening” actions by the NATO alliance and participating in military drills.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Merkel earlier this week called on Russia to reduce its border deployment.
The call came after German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on April 14 accused Russia of seeking provocation with its troop buildup.
“My impression is that the Russian side is trying everything to provoke a reaction,” Kramp-Karrenbauer said.
Australia has officially attributed the SolarWinds cyber attack to Russia and has committed to helping the US in holding the nation “to account” for the incident.
Overnight US President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order declaring a national emergency to deal with the threat of Russia’s foreign interference, including “malicious cyber-enabled activities”.
In a joint statement released late Thursday, Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne, Defence Minister Peter Dutton and Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews condemned Moscow for a “harmful cyber campaign” against US firm SolarWinds.
“Over the past 12 months, Australia has witnessed Russia use malicious activity to undermine international stability, security and public safety. Australia condemns such behaviour,” the Ministers said.
“Russia’s campaign has affected thousands of computer systems worldwide. Australia acknowledges the high costs borne by the US private sector.”
Marise Payne joined the Defence and Home Affairs Ministers in attributing the SolarWinds attack to Russia. Image: Ron Przysucha/United States Department of State.
SolarWinds is a major IT firm that provides software to large companies and governments. A massive cybersecurity attack on the company spread to its clients last year and is believed to have exposed sensitive information held by the US government, including data of the US military and White House.
Hackers from Russia were suspected almost immediately when the attack was first reported by Reuters in December last year. US security agencies first accused the Russian government of orchestrating the SolarWinds attack in January.
But the attack was not officially attributed to the state actor until Thursday in a joint advisory from US intelligence firms that named Russian Foreign Intelligence Service actors APT29, Cozy Bear, and The Dukes as being supported by the Kremlin.
US President Joe Biden also signed an Executive Order on Thursday condemning the Russian government’s foreign interference, including meddling in US elections and the facilitation of “malicious cyber-enabled activities against the United States and its allies and partners”.
President Biden’s order includes a host of sanctions against Russia, escalating tensions between the superpowers.
“The United States is not ready to come to terms with the objective reality that there is a multipolar world that excludes American hegemony,” a Russian government spokeswoman said.
“We have repeatedly warned the United States about the consequences of its hostile steps, which dangerously increase the degree of confrontation between our countries.
“A response to sanctions is inevitable.”
The Australian government joined international partners in supporting the US to combat the SolarWinds incident in its joint statement on attack.
“Australia welcomes private sector and government responders’ efforts around the world to expose and mitigate this threat and uphold the international norms of responsible behaviour in cyberspace,” the statement said.
MOSCOW — Since his return to Russia and subsequent jailing in January, opposition politician Aleksei Navalny has been the subject of heated debates amid a wave of criminal cases and harassment against those who publicly endorse him.
Students have been expelled and supporters of all stripes subjected to punitive measures for speaking out in favor of the Kremlin critic and his yearslong campaign against authoritarian President Vladimir Putin.
But throughout the clampdown, one institution has largely maintained a guarded silence: the Russian Orthodox Church.
So when Aleksei Uminsky, the head of a parish in east-central Moscow, urged “Christian mercy” for Navalny in a two-minute video posted online, his words prompted a spate of accusations and an unusual public apology that forced the institution to break its silence and exposed a division within it over political issues and proximity to the state.
“For me as a priest, it’s not so important what an inmate’s name is or what crime he was convicted of,” Uminsky says in the video, without specifically endorsing Navalny or his politics. “But what is hugely important for me are the words of Christ, who urges the same attitude toward every person who finds themselves behind bars as toward Christ himself.”
Navalny’s deteriorating health since he was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison on February 2 has been a cause célèbre for Russian civil society and many public figures concerned about the scale and severity of the state’s campaign to root out opposition ahead of parliamentary elections expected in September.
It’s also the latest dark turn in Navalny’s monthslong ordeal, which began with his poisoning with a military-grade nerve agent in August, continued with his jailing upon his return from treatment in Germany, and now, his relatives and supporters allege, could reach a grim denouement with a hunger strike that he commenced in early April over inadequate medical care at a notorious prison 100 kilometers east of Moscow.
A still image from CCTV footage shows what is said to be jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny speaking with a prison guard at his prison outside Moscow earlier this month.
Church leaders, who hold sway over millions of faithful in Russia, have been tight-lipped over the Navalny saga. So heads turned when, within two days of Uminsky’s public plea on April 7, the Russian Orthodox Church’s Spas TV channel aired a lengthy tirade against the priest.
During a one-sided, 90-minute program titled Who Is Dragging The Church Into Politics And Making Martyrs Of Criminals?, Sergei Karnaukhov, a lecturer in politics at a Moscow university, described Uminsky as a “criminal in a cassock” and suggested the priest should be arrested before he “plunges our church into an abyss.” Karnaukhov called for a broader, concerted campaign to discipline priests who undermine Russia’s constitution.
Uminsky, a well-regarded priest who has published extensively on the topic of church teaching and served as a television host in his own right, has long cultivated a reputation as one of the few Russian clergymen who openly sympathizes with the opposition. He has visited Russian prisons to speak with inmates and chaplains and has added his name to initiatives in support of jailed Russian protesters.
In 2019, amid a crackdown following rallies in Moscow that led to prison sentences for participants, Uminsky was one of more than 180 priests who signed an open letter urging the authorities to show leniency and free arrested activists. It was an intervention in politics that church scholars said was unprecedented in Russia since the 1991 Soviet collapse, and it prompted a move by church authorities to discipline some clergymen who endorsed it.
Karnaukhov’s denunciation of Uminsky’s statement was in line with the Kremlin’s long-standing conspiratorial narrative about protests and those who back them. But despite its close ties to the state, the Orthodox Church has often been riven by conflicting views over whether and how to respond to opposition protests and the authorities’ often violent tactics to suppress them. And the stance of Uminsky, a respected clergyman, has only deepened that ambivalence.
“Uminsky has long irritated the most conservative members of the church,” church expert Roman Lunkin told RFE/RL. “But disciplining him would risk alienating other church members, especially young believers who may feel sympathy for Navalny.”
Against this backdrop, Karnaukhov’s public condemnation of Uminsky’s stance — and especially his calls for criminal charges — elicited a spat among bodies tied to the Russian Orthodox Church, a generally ultraconservative faith whose head, Patriarch Kirill, has aligned himself publicly with Putin and been accused of, and vehemently denied, engaging in large-scale corruption.
Orthodoxy And The World, a popular news website focused on church issues, announced it was severing ties with Spas TV until the channel apologizes to Uminsky. Karnaukhov’s words represented the “mockery of a respected priest,” the outlet said. After several other church figures and religious experts criticized the Spas TV program, the channel promised to issue an apology to Uminsky.
The apology, or something close to it, came at the end of a studio discussion on April 12. Golovanov, the Spas TV presenter, stopped short of defending Uminsky, but acknowledged that airing Karnaukhov’s accusations was a mistake. He said the church’s role was to rise above social conflicts and mediate peace between warring parties. He promised his program would return to its original primary focus: church teaching and questions of faith.
“Spas TV, like the church, unites people of all stripes,” Golovanov said. “Sorry to all those who were offended.”
